“Read – Learn – Grow – Be Kind” – this street library says it all (Image credit: Language on the Move)

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge 2026 is out!

Now in its ninth year, the goals of our reading challenge have remained broadly unchanged since 2018: to encourage reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun.

These goals have become even more relevant, due to two converging trends:

On the one hand, book reading is in freefall internationally while, on the other hand, screen time is rising exponentially.

If you think this is just a case of one medium replacing another, you are unfortunately mistaken.

In its most prevalent form – social media use – screen time has negative effects on our ability to concentrate, to think deeply and critically, and to develop empathy. These negative effects are now so widely felt that their popular designation “brain rot” was selected as the Oxford Word of the Year 2024.

Book reading, by contrast, is the antidote to brain rot. Book reading challenges us to concentrate and to deeply engage with an extended argument or a narrative universe.

To train your brain you need to read long form. You can’t outsource your reading to AI-generated summaries, either.

Furthermore, many of our readers are (aspiring) researchers and Stephen King’s advice in On Writing is valid in our profession, too:

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

The Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenge is here for you develop, enjoy and extend the habits and pleasures of reading, particularly in the field of linguistic diversity and social participation. For each month of 2026, we are suggesting a category and one of our team members offers a recommendation in that category.

Enjoy and feel free to add your own recommendations in the “Comments” section below.

And don’t forget that, in addition to the categories and recommendations suggested here, the Language-on-the-Move Podcast will also continue to bring you regular reading ideas in 2026.

Happy Reading!

Previous Language-on-the-Move Reading Challenges

• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2025
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2024
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2023
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2022
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2020
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2019
• Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2018

January: a book about new technologies in intercultural communication

Recommendation: Cabalquinto, E. C. B. (2022). (Im)mobile Homes: Family Life at a Distance in the Age of Mobile Media. Oxford University Press.

Earvin’s presentation about the myth of digital inclusion of older migrants in Australia was one of the highlights of our recent symposium devoted to “New technologies in intercultural communication.”
Whether you missed out on the symposium or want to deepen your engagement with Earvin’s work, (Im)mobile Homes offers a gripping exploration of the use of smartphones, social media, and apps in the family and care practices of transnational families. (Ingrid Piller)

February: a book about settler colonialism

Recommendation: Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press.

This book completely reshaped my understanding of Indigenous politics, border, nation, and sovereignty in North America. It also made me reflect on my reliance on the extensive literature on Indigenous cultures and languages – ritual speech, performances, tales, or beliefs – produced over the last century by anthropologists and linguists, most of which are dismissive of the scene of dispossession, the complicated history of places, or simply what people say about themselves and their struggles. (Gegentuul Baioud)

March: a book stirs that your social imagination

Recommendation: Bregman, R. (2017). Utopia for realists. Bloomsbury.

In this book, Rutger Bregman stirs our imagination by inviting us to re-think the way modern society is organized and by offering us a glimpse into a potentially better future for all. He calls for a new vision that would more effectively address current global challenges such as increasing inequalities or the progressing automation of labor.
But what does he exactly propose?
In short, a 15-hour work week, universal basic income and open borders. The author invites you on a journey between time and spaces with real examples of communities that have taken utopia seriously and have started to experiment with it. (Olga Vlasova)

April: A book about the philosophy of language

Recommendation: Le Guin, U. (1974). The Dispossessed. HarperCollins.

Le Guin constantly fluctuates the reader´s receptors between the old and the new, roots and progress, personal and professional, politics and philosophy. We follow the life and work of a physicist who travels back and forth between two historically connected but contrasting planets and political systems.
The protagonist commits to seeking the truth not only by understanding his own context of origin but also by defying it; how do we find our truth? And is it ever objective? The novel is considered a post-feminist utopian fiction raising discussions on whether linguistic innovation is necessary for conceptual change.
A story of intergalactic migration trying to answer the long-standing question: to whom does knowledge belong? (Mara Kyrou)

May: A book about the experience of growing up as the child of a migrant

Recommendation 1: Vuong, O. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin.

Vietnamese-American history, language, and generational trauma come together in the form of a poetic letter with utterances such as “I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.” Dedicated to someone who will never see it: the author’s mother, who never learned how to read.
Through the eyes of a young man named Little Dog discovering his homosexuality in a space for undocumented immigrants, this book tells the story of a Vietnamese immigrant family in the US and their complex relationship with the English language. It chronicles their migration history escaping the atrocities of war, the fragile family dynamics that emerged from that experience, and the love for words that connects the writer with himself, while ironically separating him from his mother. (Juan Felipe Sánchez Guzmán)

Recommendation 2: Toxische Pommes. (2024). Ein schönes Ausländerkind. Zsolnay.

Ein Schönes Ausländerkind is a fictionalised autobiography of the author’s childhood, after her family fled to Austria due to the Yugoslav Wars. The book made me laugh a lot, as the author (who writes under the pseudonym she uses to post satirical sketches online) pokes fun at the many absurdities of migrant life. But I also found it very powerful in its depiction of a messy, painful, but loving father-daughter relationship where the adult struggles to learn the local language, leading to child language brokering. (Jenia Yudytska)

June: A book about narrative research in a migration context

Recommendation: Stevenson, Patrick (2017). Language and migration in a multilingual metropolis: Berlin Lives. Palgrave Macmillan.

This book offers a highly engaging and innovative exploration of Berlin’s multilingualism through personal migration narratives. Working ethnographically, the researcher situates his analysis in a single shared apartment in Neukölln, using the linguistic repertoires and biographical trajectories of its five residents—a Russian-speaking woman, two Polish-speakers, a Kurdish-speaking man, and a Vietnamese-speaking woman—to demonstrate how migration, identity and sociolinguistic practice intersect in everyday life.
The book portrays the apartment as a microcosm of the city’s wider linguistic landscape, tracing how individuals navigate language ideologies, negotiate belonging, and construct social relations within a complex metropolitan environment. (Martin Serif Derince)

July: A book exploring linguistic diversity from multiple perspectives

Recommendation: Aguilar Gil, Y. E. (2020). Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística. Almadia.

Language loss, resistance, indigenous literature(s), prejudice, identity, autonyms and exonyms – these are just some of the topics discussed in this collection of essays by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, an Ayuujk linguist, writer, translator, and activist. An interactive work edited by the author’s colleagues, this book presents texts written for an online magazine over several years alongside links to related social media posts, as well as a speech given by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil at the Mexican Chamber of Deputies and a closing epilogue by herself. A great read – refreshing and profoundly reflexive – for anyone interested in linguistic diversity in Mexico and beyond. (Nicole Marinaro)

August: A book about translation and interpreting

Recommendation: Shuttleworth, M., & Daghigh, A. J. (Eds.). (2024). Translation and Neoliberalism. Springer.

This book examines how neoliberalism shapes translation and interpreting across diverse regions, focusing on four themes: market-driven translation and interpreting curricula, policy impacts on language services, technology’s role in translation and interpreting markets, and intersections of translation and neoliberalism at a discourse level. It offers critical insights for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers into the socio-economic forces transforming translation studies, industries and curricula. (Jinhyun Cho)

September: A book about digital migration studies

Recommendation: Leurs, Koen, & Ponzanesi, Sandra (Eds.). (2025). Doing Digital Migration Studies: Theories and practices of the everyday. Routledge.

This open-access edited volume serves as an introduction to ‘digital migration studies’, an umbrella term for research on migration in relation to digital technologies. The articles examine topics ranging from migrant agency on TikTok to the use of automatic dialect recognition during the asylum procedure.
Although most contributions don’t explicitly focus on language, the breadth of topics and methodologies covered still sparked ideas for new research directions for me as a linguist. (Jenia Yudytska)

October: A book about an under-recognized diaspora

Recommendation: Bald, V. (2013). Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America. Harvard University Press.

Film and other information: http://bengaliharlem.com

Historical Harlem, New York does not conjure up images of South Asians going about their daily lives, but Bengali Harlem tells us the story of immigrants who arrived from the 1800s onwards from the Indian subcontinent.
This book focuses on migrants who were ethnolinguistically Bengalis (from what was known as Bengal) and came as merchants, seamen, or laborers to be absorbed into working class America. In the face of racism and discrimination, they built homes and lives, leaving behind generations of Americans with Bengali cultural and linguistic heritage. (Tazin Abdullah)

November: A book of migrant poetry

Recommendation: Saleh, S. M., Syed, Z., & Younus, M. (Eds.). (2025). Ritual: A Collection of Muslim Australian Poetry. Sweatshop Literacy Movement.

Billed as “evocative, unsettling, and unafraid,” this rich collection of Muslim Australian poetry offers a rich treasure trove of poems to come back to and savour again and again. The poems invite the reader to not only reflect on the diversity of Muslim identities but what it means to live on Indigenous land as a designated migrant within a White settler colony. (Ingrid Piller)

December: Cozy fiction for when you need a break from your research

Recommendation: Arden, K. (2019). The Winternight Trilogy. Del Rey.

I’m now 1.5 years into my PhD and I find that, now more than ever, I need good fiction to read after a long day of academic reading/writing. The Winternight Trilogy is set in the harsh winters of a folkloric version of medieval Russia and follows Vasya, a young woman whose difficult peasant life collides with those of chyerti, the demons and devils of Slavic folklore.
The settings and creatures described in this trilogy are nothing short of magical, and reading the prose makes me feel like I am tucked away snug in a winter cabin with a roaring fire and hot chocolate.
A lesson that I am learning along my PhD journey is that it is imperative to nourish myself while I work so hard, and reading these books is part of that nourishment for me. Knowing that I have the winter snows and rich folklore of these books to look forward to at the end of the day helps me to persevere through the daily ups and downs of PhD life. (Brynn Quick)

For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see Life in a New Language, Discrimination by any other name: Language tests and racist immigration policy in Australia, Intercultural Communication – Now in the third edition, and Judging Refugees.

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (coming soon)

Hans Sauer was a specialist in the English language and literature of the Middle Ages. An overview of his career can be found in the obituary by another of his students, Professor Gaby Waxenberger, which I’m reproducing here in full:

***

Vale Professor Hans Sauer

It is with great sadness that we announce the sudden and unexpected passing of Prof. Dr. Hans Sauer on 31 May 2022. Hans will be remembered as an outstanding teacher, researcher, and person.

Born on 9 September 1946 in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Hans Sauer attended school there. He studied English, Latin, and German at LMU Munich.

Hans Sauer taught and lectured at many universities in Germany (Würzburg, Dresden, Eichstätt and Munich), in Europe (e.g., Innsbruck, Austria; Brno, Czech Republic; Warsaw, Poznan, Lodz, and Katowice, Poland; Palermo, Italy) and worldwide (e.g., Columbus, Ohio, US; Tokyo, Japan; Beijing and Chongqing, China; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia).

He was a caring university teacher and supported both his students and his staff beyond the call of duty. Hans Sauer supervised more than 30 dissertations and habilitations, and innumerable M.A. theses.

Hans was a never-ending fountain of knowledge and wisdom. His publications bear witness to his expertise in a wide variety of topics. He published more than 20 books, editions and studies on medieval English texts as well as more than 200 articles. These covered a wide range of subject areas: word-formation; plant names; glossaries and lexicography; Beowulf; especially Beowulf translations and adaptations; the history of linguistics and of English studies; the varieties of English; pidgins and creoles; advertising language; interjections, and binomials.

He was co-editor of Anglia, LexMA (Lexikon des Mittelalters), MET (Middle English Texts), MUSE (formerly TUEPh = Texte und Untersuchungen zur englischen Philologie), and of the book series English and Beyond.

Hans Sauer was a unique person of unparalleled kindness, generosity, and wisdom, of unprejudiced curiosity and open-mindedness, and with a heart of gold, rooted in his deep faith in God. He will be remembered with great admiration and respect, and above all, with much affection. We have lost a great scholar and a wonderful person.

(Gaby Waxenberger)

***

I also remember Professor Sauer as a teacher and scholar of extraordinary kindness and generosity.

I first met Professor Sauer as a graduate student at the University of Würzburg, where I took one of his classes about Chaucer. The seminar involved a lot of close reading of the Canterbury Tales – we learned the opening lines of the Prologue by heart – and a fascinating mélange of linguistics, literature, and history.

When I recite the opening lines to myself, as I often do, I always think of Professor Sauer:

Chaucer as pilgrim (Ellesmere manuscript) (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in switch licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So Priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

***

When Professor Sauer accepted a new position as chair professor of English Linguistics at Dresden University of Technology just around the time of my graduation, he offered me a position as his assistant. For the next three years, I worked alongside him in an exciting teaching and research position in a vibrant university, city, and region undergoing deep transformations just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. A reflection on my unique teaching experience during that time can be found in this post about multilingual Europe.

I experienced an academic apprenticeship that continues to form the basis for my own approach to supervision. There are at least four lessons I learned.

First, Professor Sauer believed in academic freedom to a fault. He granted me complete freedom in the choice of my research topic and accepted my interest in American Automobile Names – which another of my academic teachers, Professor Erwin Koller, had ignited – without even trying to steer me to a topic more closely aligned with his own research interests.

Unlike many PhD supervisors, Professor Sauer was never overbearing. He was there with advice and guidance when I needed it but he never attempted to steer me in a particular direction or lay claim to my work. For that early experience of academic independence I am deeply grateful.

Attending operas in the Semperoper was one of the side benefits of doing a PhD with Professor Sauer (Image credit: Wikipedia)

Second, Professor Sauer created networks and opportunities for interaction and exchange. He enjoyed “geselliges Beisammensein” – spending time in sociable interaction – and arranged for a steady stream of seminars, academic visits, and joint meals. These occasions allowed myself and other junior scholars associated with the newly founded English Department to engage in conversations as a form of joint inquiry.

To this day, I value this socialization and the Language on the Move network has been my attempt to recreate something similar for my own students and mentees in a different context.

Third, Professor Sauer was a committed European and internationalist. At a time when academics in English Departments in Germany looked almost exclusively to the UK and USA for international exchange, Professor Sauer fostered connections with colleagues in Eastern Europe. During my candidature, he encouraged me to take up a visiting fellowship at the University of Łódź, Poland, and secured funding for me to attend conferences at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and at the University of Timișoara, Romania.

After graduation, Professor Sauer helped me obtain a position as visiting assistant professor at Ithaca College in New York. For me, these efforts created formative experiences and led to lifelong networks and friendships. I know that the same is true for many other students and colleagues in Professor Sauer’s orbit.

Fourth, Professor Sauer modelled the ideal of the well-rounded humanist. A passionate opera lover, he was always organizing parties to see one performance or other. He taught us to make the most of life in a city with a famous opera house, the Semperoper, and a unique operetta venue, the Staatsoperette. Tickets were still subsidized and with a bit of planning it was always possible to secure affordable seats. Before I started my PhD, I had never been to see an opera and one of the side benefits of my doctoral years was that I learned to appreciate the operatic tradition.

The three years I worked for Professor Sauer launched my academic career and I remember them with much fondness. I will be forever grateful to Professor Sauer for his teaching, his guidance, his mentorship, and the doors he opened for me.

While we mourn his passing, his legacy lives on in his students. May he rest in peace and may his family find comfort in the affection and admiration he inspired!

Related content

• In memoriam Michael Clyne
• In memoriam Erwin Koller
• In memoriam Hans Reich

Interview with Professor Sauer, 9th International Conference on Middle English, Wrocław, 2015

The Language on the Move team is here to help!

After the Language on the Move Reading Challenges of 2018, 2019, and 2020, this is the fourth time we are running the Language on the Move Reading Challenge.

This year, we have created a monthly calendar of reading recommendations to keep you company throughout the year.

As was the case previously, the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021 is designed to encourage broad reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun. Anyone with an interest in the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life can join.

Throughout the year, make sure to watch out for in-depth reviews and interactive conversations related to each reading, both here on this site and over on Twitter @lg_on_the_move.

Enjoy the recommendations from our team and feel free to add your own recommendations in the comment section below! We are interested in any good reads illuminating the intersection of language and social life.

January

Hanna Torsh recommends The Sydney Language by Jakelin Troy (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019, 2^nd ed.).

“Jakelin Troy documents the language of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Sydney Region, which no longer has any speakers. Drawing on historical sources, the book provides a classic example of language contact and intercultural communication. Shadows of those encounters between Aboriginal people and colonizers continue to exist in the vocabulary of Australian English. “Waratah” is a good example. The flower to which it refers is the name of the NSW floral emblem and of a major rugby team.”

February

Pia Tenedero recommends Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Crown Publishing, 2012).

“I like having Reading Group via Zoom because I feel more confident to express myself in this digital platform than in our face-to-face meetings – possibly an indication of my introvert side. This is partly why Susan Cain’s exploration of communication styles and the stereotypes linked to them appeals to me. There is a dominant belief that the ideal self, successful students, model employees, or the best leaders enjoy the spotlight, act quickly, and talk fast, aloud, and a lot. Extroversion is also perceived as a “Western” communication style. As a result, those who do not fit the pattern are oftentimes viewed through a deficit lens, as I have found in my research with globalized accountants in the Philippines.”

March

Vera Williams Tetteh recommends Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa by Nwando Achebe (Ohio University Press, 2020).

“In 2009, I gifted Ingrid (Piller) a glossy catalogue celebrating 50 years of Ghanaian history. She was puzzled at this short time span and asked where all the history before that was. Not having an answer at the time, I have become an avid reader of African history since. Nwando Achebe provides a brilliant African-centred history of women in leadership roles on the continent during pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial times. The book opens with my most favourite African proverb – “Until the lions have their own historians, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” and, throughout, addresses the question: whose histories, whose stories, whose archives?”

April

Loy Lising recommends Challenging the Myth of Monolingual Corpora edited by Arja Nurmi, Tanja Rutten, and Paivi Pahta (Brill, 2017).

“This book addresses how the monolingual mindset pervades even the discipline of linguistics itself, specifically the sub-discipline of corpus linguistics. The monolingual mindset manifests in the compilation, annotation, and use of corpora, and multilingual practices are converted into monolingual corpora at each of these levels. As one of the contributors to the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English, I am concerned that any non-English data in that corpus are either marked as <indig>, if they are in a local language, or <foreign>, if they are in Spanish. The book offers many helpful lenses through which to query these practices and to consider how non-English elements could be better incorporated so that they can serve as meaningful evidence of language contact and language change.”

May

Madiha Neelam recommends Language Policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches by Elana Shohamy (Routledge, 2006).

“This book inspires me to think more deeply about how language can serve as a means of control and categorisation. Shohamy explains how perceptions of language as a limited entity, governed by fixed boundaries, and strict rules of correctness make language amenable to manipulation for political, social, and economic purposes. Language tests, in particular, are powerful tools of control and social categorisation.”

June

Samar Al-Khalil recommends Neoliberalism and English Language Education Policies in the Arabian Gulf by Osman Z. Barnawi (Routledge, 2017).

“Barnawi shows how education in the Gulf region is changing as societies move from oil-based to knowledge-based economies. In this context, education has become entirely subject to the needs of the job market and economic agendas. This has resulted in a series of tensions as this form of neoliberal and globalized education comes into conflict with Islamic values and Arab identities. The book helps me to think more critically about the broader socioeconomic context in which my research about the promotional discourses of private English language teaching institutes in Saudi Arabia is embedded.”

July

Shiva Motaghi-Tabari recommends Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia edited by Anita Heiss (Black Inc., 2018).

“Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is an anthology of fifty short life stories written by Aboriginal people from all walks of life and spanning a variety of generations and regions. It is a compilation of diverse voices and perspectives which have identity, culture, and racism at their core. One of the themes that stands out throughout the book is the contributors’ struggles to understand their identity, and to find a sense of belonging and acceptance. The book enriched my own learning and understanding about Indigenous people in many ways, and I would recommend the book particularly to migrants to Australia, who can too easily avoid confronting Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing struggles of its First Nations people.”

August

Alexandra Grey recommends Language Investment and Employability: The Uneven Distribution of Resources in the Public Employment Service by Mi-Cha Flubacher, Alexandre Duchêne and Renata Coray (Palgrave, 2018).

“This book reports on a 9-month institutional ethnography inside various offices of Switzerland’s public employment service across the officially French-German bilingual Canton of Fribourg. It is a brilliant example of an institutional ethnography. The study demonstrates that language policy research should not always take a specific official language policy as its starting point. Instead, it is important for researchers to look at sites and processes where both overt and covert language policy is made and applied without taking on the official guise of ‘a policy about language’. Here, the rules, official policies and official discourses are, on their face, about eligibility for state assistance and employability, but the study shows how language practices, migration histories, and language repertoires are constructed within them.”

September

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends Home advantage: social class and parental intervention in elementary education by Annette Lareau (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, 2^nd ed).

“Working-class families want their children to succeed in school, just like middle-class families, but they are not endowed with the same resources. Lareau shows that social class has a powerful impact on educational success; that is, parental involvement in schooling correlates strongly to children’s educational attainment. For working-class families, school and family life are strictly separated. By contrast, school and family life are interconnected for middle class families. Parental possession and activation of cultural resources yields social and educational profits for middle class children, which results in the strong connection between social class and educational outcomes. The book challenges me to think more deeply about how the class-school relationship is complicated when linguistic difference and migrant status also come into play. Schools should help fill the gap by providing inclusive multilingual information.”

October

Jinhyun Cho recommends Language and Symbolic Power by Pierre Bourdieu (Polity, 1992).

“I have read this book numerous times and treat it as my sociolinguistic bible. I continue to find new perspectives and insights into the relationship between language and society at each reading. By shifting the focus from language per se to its situatedness in complex social relations, Bourdieu’s theory of language as capital works seamlessly in the theorisation of linguistic markets, in which a price is formed on language, and censorship operates in order to distinguish legitimate language from other varieties. Although Bourdieu’s theory was formed in the French context of the 2^nd half of the 20^th century, it has been foundational to my own research related to translation and interpreting in contemporary South Korea, where English serves as a key instrument of distinction.”

November

Tazin Abdullah recommends Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia by Samia Khatun (University of Queensland Press, 2019).

“Much of the narrative surrounding Australian immigrants posits migration as a recent phenomenon. Australianama (“The book of Australia”), in contrast, is a refreshing insight into the historic connection immigrants have had with land and people. Khatun traces the South Asian Muslim presence in Australia using literature in South Asian languages and stories found in Aboriginal accounts. She explains, convincingly, that an understanding of immigrant history is found not in languages associated with European/colonial knowledge systems, but within the literature of immigrant and Aboriginal languages. The stories that Khatun unearths definitively illustrate the influence of historical, social and cultural factors that produce the linguistic representation of immigrants. I thoroughly enjoyed this fresh perspective on the story of Australia.”

December

Ingrid Piller recommends The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns edited by Dohra Ahmad and with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat (Penguin, 2019).

“I’ve probably learned more about language – and life in general, I might add – from literature than from linguistics. And this anthology offers a kaleidoscope of the many facets in which language is entwined in the experience of migration. Ahmad has brought together a brilliant collection of migrant literature with pieces focused on the experience of leaving home, arriving in a destination, and creating, or trying to create, a new home. Although the US and UK still loom large among the destinations, Ahmad has made a huge effort to include a wide variety of origins and destinations. Another strength of the anthology is that, in addition to some well-known names, it features many newer writers who have not yet been widely anthologized – I’ve discovered a number of authors to add to my favorite writers list.”

Murakami’s Yesterday – a short story that forms one of the seven stories collected in a book titled Men without Women – constitutes a case in point. The story amused me as much as it took me back to some of my recent academic reading: “novelists and journalists constitute a cadre of producers or senders of metadiscursive messages about speech and accent in public space” (Agha, 2007, p. 302).

Novelists not only spread the indexical stereotypes of speech further among the public but also play with and suspend such indexical typification. Let me illustrate how Murakami achieves this via his story Yesterday (for a synopsis see here).

In the story, two young men change their accents to take on different social persona yet in different directions with divergent results. Tanimura, a native of Kansai picked up the standard Japanese language in Tokyo within the first month of his arrival at Waseda University. Clearly, he falls within the group of ‘normal’ people who switch to the standard Japanese in Tokyo.

By contrast, Kitaru, a Tokyo-born-and-bred high school graduate permanently metamorphoses himself into a Kansai dialect speaker. As you can guess, Tanimura fits well with his surroundings and happily starts his university life in cosmopolitan Tokyo without betraying any traces of his Kansai origin.

It is Kitaru with his new Kansai dialect who causes problems for people around him. His dialect use adds an air of eccentricity to his otherwise relatively unremarkable person. He is even described as weird and not normal by his girlfriend Erika, in response to which Kitaru retorts, pointing at Tanimura: “this guy’s pretty weird too, he’s from Ashiya [Kansai dialect area] but only speaks the Tokyo dialect”. Exasperated, Erika said: “that’s much more common, at least more common than the opposite”.

At this point it is helpful to take a short detour to look at how the Kansai dialect spoken mainly in Osaka and its adjacent areas is enregistered. A survey conducted by Södergren (2014) has shown that Kansai dialect was regarded as ‘straightforward’, ‘frank’, ‘expressive’ as well as ‘warm’ and the flipside of which equally applies as it is also seen as ‘rude/over-familiar’, ‘vulgar’, ‘sloppy’ and ‘too intense and too aggressive’. The researcher goes on to note the link between Kansai dialect and comedy. This is related to the boom of manzai, where a comic duo entertain their audience through a comic dialogue in Kansai dialect.

Conversely, the standard Japanese linked with Tokyo conjures up images of ‘new Japan’, advancement, internationalization, politeness and so forth. Clearly, such juxtapositions over-simplify the complexity and nuances of language use and attitudes since they are freely-floating decontextualized stereotypes. However, it is exactly these stereotypical indexicals of accents that are presupposed and reworked in the story Yesterday.

Kitaru, a somewhat idiosyncratic young man who has failed college entrance exams and has ended up in cram schools while his girlfriend enjoys all the freshness a university life can offer, defies his Tokyo identity by uttering everything in Kansai dialect completely disregarding the consequences of such non-congruent linguistic practice in Tokyo. Tanimura aptly describes this strangeness caused by Kitaru’s Kansai dialect as:

Kitaru wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was pleasant looking enough. He wasn’t tall but he was slim, and his hair and clothes were simple and stylish. As long as he didn’t say anything you’d assume he was a sensitive, well-brought-up city boy. He and his girlfriend made a great-looking couple. His only possible defect was that his face, a bit too slender and delicate, could give the impression that he was lacking in personality or was wishy-washy. But the moment he opened his mouth, this overall positive effect collapsed like a sand castle under an exuberant Labrador retriever. People were dismayed by his Kansai dialect, which he delivered fluently, as if that weren’t enough, in a slightly piercing, high-pitched voice. The mismatch with his looks was overwhelming (p. 51).

What is animated here is the image of a language rather than a person. The object of representation is Kansai dialect through which the novelistic figure Kitaru is represented. This technique of foregrounding the image of dialect runs through the whole story and acts as a key motif to the extent that we can even argue that Kitaru is animated and created through the objectification of his accent.

Even more crucial for the portrayal of Kitaru are the mismatches in his identity: his looks, his hair, his place of origin do not match with his language. This mismatch is what makes him a misfit, despite its effectiveness in setting him free from the ‘shackles’ of his undesirable Tokyo life.

The discomfort and dismay caused by Kitaru’s incongruent semiotic practices challenges the default perception of an essentialized link between language and identity. Most importantly, his actions subvert the norm and lay bare the contested nature of the authoritative and near-universal use of the standard language in the nation’s capital.

In the process, Kitaru engages in the resignification of the social field, to borrow from Butler (1992). Multiplying the voices in a delimited and centripetal place is not without consequences.

Novelists are indeed the senders and producers of metadiscursive messages about accents. Yet, they also reveal the discursive processes through which we build and solidify our own sand castles to avoid communicational mishaps and social castigation.

References

Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, J. P. (1992). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the questions of “postmodernism”. In J. P. Butler & J. W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge.
Södergren, S. (2014). “Metcha suki ya nen”: A sociolinguistic attitude survey concerning the Kansai dialect. BA thesis. Uppsala Uppsala University.

Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not … they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb – that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail – the bravery, even, of the lions.

Achebe’s story illustrates that reading is a powerful mind-altering technology: at its best, reading allows us to leave our own selves behind and see the world through someone else’s eyes. For example, reading Achebe’s novel Things fall apart enabled me to experience the world through the perspective of a 19th century Igbo tribesman. Stepping out from our own identity and into someone else’s place in this way extends us in multiple ways. It increases our capacity for empathy and our understanding of the breadth and diversity of human experience.

However, as Achebe points out, there is a dark side to reading as a shaper of minds and identities: stories that never feature people like ourselves or only depict them as negative stereotypes – as “stupid and ugly” – are deeply alienating.

People who have learned to see themselves exclusively through the eyes of others are easily controlled. All regimes of domination make use of these forms of mind control by restricting the circulation of stories.

The annals of colonialism are full of these attempts at mind control via control over literacy. Some are of breathtaking barbarity, such as the burning of the Mayan books by the Spanish conquerors. The destruction of the flourishing and advanced Mesoamerican civilizations was so complete that today few people even know that the precolonial Mayans had developed a writing system and were recording their scientific knowledge, particularly of astronomy, in books.

Destroying the books of the Mayans – and thus consigning their writing system and their knowledge to oblivion – paved the way for the colonizers to re-invent the colonized as an abject people without history and independent identity whose “agony, travail and bravery” remains untold, unnoticed, even unimaginable.

Excerpt from the Dresden Codex, one of only 4 surviving Mayan books (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The technologies of the 16^th century made the destruction of the Mayan codices a relatively straightforward undertaking. As Bishop de Landa states, “we burned them all.” And when he says “all”, he literally meant “all”. Today, only four Mayan codices are known to survive. To add insult to injury, none of these are (easily) accessible to the descendants of the Mayas. Three are located in European libraries in Dresden, Madrid, and Paris, and the fourth in the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City.

Burning books has always been a crude way to control minds. Keeping the stories of the lions out of circulation has always been a more efficient and subtle strategy.

For a long time, the possibility of resistance to mind control via keeping stories out of circulation was severely curtailed by technology. Even when Achebe decided that he would become a writer to tell the story of colonized Nigerians in the middle of the 20^th century, getting his stories published was incredibly difficult. There was no African publishing house and, in fact, not even a typing service. He had to entrust the hand-written copy of his first novel – and the only copy in existence – to international mail and send it all the way to London so that it could be typed up for manuscript submission to a publishing house.

We have come a long way since then. Postcolonial literatures have established themselves, women writers have entered the canons, and, in many contexts, the dominated have found ways to not only tell their own stories in their own words but also to get them published. New technologies are lowering the barriers to circulating the stories of the lions to ever larger audiences.

Do you find yourself in the books you read? And do you make an effort to seek out the stories of those who are different from you?

References

Achebe, C. (1958). Things fall apart. London: Heinemann.
Brooks, J. (1994). Chinua Achebe, The Art of Fiction No. 139. Paris Review. Retrieved from https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1720/chinua-achebe-the-art-of-fiction-no-139-chinua-achebe
Landa, D. (ca. 1566) Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. Retrieved from https://www.wayeb.org/download/resources/landa.pdf

Students of Beijing Normal University who were part of the May Fourth Movement (Image credit: Wikipedia)

This month marks the 100^th anniversary of China’s May 4 Movement. This intellectual and cultural movement was to have a profound and lasting impact on the Chinese language.  

On 4 May 1919, thousands of students gathered in Beijing to protest China’s treatment at the Paris Peace Conference to end World War I. The conference had decided a few days earlier, on 30 April, that Germany’s territorial possessions in Shandong Province would be handed to Japan, not returned to China. The students marched to the foreign legation quarter and, finding it blocked by police, went instead to the home of communications minister Cao Rulin. Some of the students burnt the house down while others beat minister to Japan, Zhang Zongxiang. Both ministers were considered collaborators with Japan. 32 students were arrested and one died in hospital as a result of injuries from a clash with police.

More protests took place in Shanghai and other cities shortly afterwards, which also called for the release of the students. Student strikes were underway in Beijing by mid-May, and in early June workers and business people went on strike in various cities. The government responded by dismissing Cao and Zhang from their positions, and refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Nevertheless, the decision to transfer Germany’s holdings to Japan was formalised in Articles 156-8 of the treaty (Mackerras, 2013).

The events of 4 May were part of the broader New Culture Movement, also sometimes referred to as the May 4 Movement. This intellectual, cultural and social movement began around 1915 and continued into the 1920s. It was prompted by the failure of the 1911 revolution to establish a stable and effective republic following the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, and focused on critiquing and attacking traditional Chinese culture, especially Confucianism, which was blamed for China’s weakness.

Its main figures, such as Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu, argued China needed science, democracy and a literary revolution to become a modern and prosperous country. Language was connected to all of these.

1959 poster celebrating the May Fourth movement (Image credit: Chineseposters.net)

The dominant kind of written Chinese at the time was文言wényán, a traditional literary style of the language. Wényán had long been used for scholarly and official purposes and most literature. It was characterised by economy of expression, lack of punctuation and substantial use of literary allusions, all of which made it very different from the everyday spoken language. These features were particularly embodied in a style of wényán called 八股文bāgǔwén, or “eight part essay”.

Becoming literate in wényán was a challenging task requiring years of study to achieve, which severely restricted literacy among the general population (Taylor & Taylor 2014).

There was also another kind of written Chinese, known as白话 báihuà (literally “plain speech”). Báihuà was a vernacular literary language and had been used since the Tang and Song dynasties to write diaries, folk stories and plays, as well as popular novels such as Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber. It was considerably closer to the everyday spoken language than wényán.

In the late Qing dynasty, some scholars and officials called for wényán to be replaced by 白话 báihuà. Some progress towards this was made during the Reform Movement of 1898, and led to a large number of newspapers, magazines and textbooks being published in báihuà (Chen, 1999; 2007). However, opposition remained because báihuà was generally considered vulgar and unsophisticated, and as such unsuitable as a medium for important functions in society.

Promoting báihuà became a major cause for New Culture Movement figures. They argued education for the whole population was necessary to establish democracy and science in China, and education required widespread literacy (Chen, 1999). In a series of articles published in 1917 and 1918, Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu put forward the case for báihuà to become “the base for a multi-purpose modern standard written language” (Chen, 1999: 72).

Memorial for the May Fourth Movement in Beijing (Image credit: Wikipedia)

In his 1917 article “Preliminary views on the reform of literature”, Hu Shi outlined eight ways in which literature could be improved, all focused on avoiding the worst elements of wényán writing. In another article the following year called “Constructive views on literary revolution”, he articulated his position on the relationship between literature and a standard written language. He contended literature must be written in the vernacular to be relevant to the present day, and exemplary works of literature written in báihuà could provide the basis for standard Chinese. Chen Duxiu similarly criticised wényán in a 1917 piece in which he described what were considered classic wényán works as “flowery, extravagant, artificial, or obscure”, and argued they were both a symptom and cause of everything that was wrong with China. He therefore believed China’s political restoration required a restoration of literature, and this required the language itself to be reformed. Like Hu Shi, his solution was báihuà (Chen, 1999: 74).

These ideas received enthusiastic support from other scholars and intellectuals spurred on by the events of May 4, 1919, and their combined efforts proved successful.

In 1920, the Ministry of Education required textbooks to be written in báihuà and báihuà to be taught in the first two years of primary school. Hundreds of newspapers and journals began using báihuà shortly thereafter. In 1921, two important literary works were published in báihuà, The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun and a collection of poetry by Guo Moruo called The Goddess, which demonstrated báihuà could indeed be used for such purposes.

By the 1940s, báihuà had become the dominant kind of written Chinese (Chen 1999; Norman 1988).

Language reform continued to be an important issue throughout the rest of the Republican era and into the Communist era, but the push for báihuà to replace wényán was an important step in the development of what would eventually become China’s national standard language, pǔtōnghuà 普通话. Pǔtōnghuà is officially defined as “the standard form of Modern Chinese with the Beijing phonological system as its norm of pronunciation, and Northern dialects as its base dialect, and looking to exemplary modern works in báihuà ‘vernacular literary language’ for its grammatical norms” (Chen, 1999: 24). This is the linguistic legacy of the May 4 Movement.

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References

Chen, P. (1999). Modern Chinese: History and sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chen, P. (2007). China. In A. Simpson (Ed.), Language and national identity in Asia (pp. 141-167). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mackerras, C. (2013). China in transformation 1900-1949 (2^nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Norman, J. (1988). Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, I. & Taylor, M.M. (2014). Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese (Revised ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Unpublished manuscripts from the estate of Hans Natonek (Source: Arts in exile)

On International Women’s Day I explored why female academics publish less than their male peers. Academic journal submissions by female economics researchers face greater scrutiny and take longer to get published, as a study by Erin Hengel has found. Successful women learn to anticipate greater scrutiny than their male peers and eventually write better; a quality improvement that comes at the expense of quantity.

The data for Hengel’s study come from published journal articles and that constitutes a limitation because publication is the exception rather than the rule: the majority of submissions – both for academic and non-academic publication – are rejected.

Systematic knowledge of rejected authorship is extremely scarce. Rejection is ostensibly based on the quality of a manuscript; but it is reasonable to assume that the identity of the author also plays a role and that female, non-white or working-class authors are more likely to have their manuscripts rejected.

A study of the archives of the US trade publisher Houghton Mifflin sheds light on this question. The researcher, Yuliya Komska, examines the relationship between indicators of foreignness and manuscript rejection during the period of World War II. The period lends itself to this kind of examination as many of the European refugees arriving in the USA during that time were intellectuals and had been writers back home. Most of them failed miserably in their attempts to reestablish their careers in a new country and through a new language, as I previously showed with reference to the Bavarian exile Oskar Maria Graf.

Komska presents some stark figures: during the period under examination Houghton Mifflin received anywhere between 150 and 300 manuscript submissions per month but signed up only one or two of these. In other words, the rejection rate was above 99%. Rejection was for the same reasons that manuscripts get rejected today: they were poorly written, they were dull, they were not timely or they did not fit with the publisher’s list.

However, as the researcher shows, quality had an accent. What does that mean? Komska defines “accented writing” as narrative themes and writing styles that were perceived as unmarketable.

First and foremost among accented writing were indicators of foreignness. A whole body of work that never saw publication were accounts of the anti-Jewish pogroms of the early 20^th century in the Russian empire and of the migration experiences of the refugees these produced. Editors and reviewers routinely denigrated such migration stories as “painfully Jewish, dull, not our book,” “monotonously tragic and so completely unrelieved by anything humorous or un-Jewish” or “a screwball book by a screwball Russian” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 285f.).

Writing with a foreign accent was not only the product of the author’s migration experience but also their class background, as Komska shows by comparing the reception of the refugees from Russia in the early 20th century to that of the refugees from the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s. This new cohort of displaced authors, mostly German-speaking Jews, were more likely to come from bourgeois backgrounds than their Yiddish- and Russian-speaking predecessors of a generation earlier. In response to the submissions of this new group of migrant authors “racist remarks receded” (Komska, 2017, p. 287).

Hans Natonek, for instance, had been one of the foremost literary critics of Weimar Germany and head of the feuilleton of Neue Leipziger Zeitung, a major national newspaper, when he arrived in the USA in 1941 after an almost decade-long odyssey from one European refuge to another. He submitted a memoir of his refugee experience and was described by reviewers as a “nice human being with a good clear intelligence” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 288). Even so, he was still rejected by Houghton Mifflin but received a contract for his autobiography In search of myself from another publisher.

In search of myself describes the author’s struggles with reestablishing himself through the medium of the English language in a language that shows no traces of that struggle. The reason for that is that the book is a translation of Natonek’s German original. When migrant manuscripts were favorably considered, translations seem to have been preferred over English-language publications with an accent, i.e. manuscripts that showed traces of late language learning. Describing an author as “not yet at home in the English language” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 288) meant rejection.

Refugees’ “broken English” could cancel out even the most extensive cultural capital, as was the case with the Mann family. While Houghton Mifflin did sign on a number of books by Erika and Klaus Mann, they rejected a manuscript by Golo Mann because of its “German overtone” (quoted in Komska, 2017, p. 289).

Incidentally, concerns with accented writing were not restricted to migrant writing but also extended to the presence of dialects and other non-standard forms of English, which were also viewed negatively.

The researcher concludes that “it was accents – wide-ranging, all-pervasive, far-reaching – more than language or languages per se that worried Houghton Mifflin the most” (Komska, 2017, p. 292). This trade press did not so much enforce monolingualism – manuscripts in languages other than English could be translated after all – as it homogenized linguistic, ethnic and class differences into one single “native” white middle-class idiom.

Reference

Komska, Y. (2017). Trade Publisher Archives: Repositories of Monolingualism? Race, Language, and Rejected Refugee Manuscripts in the Age of Total War. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 53(3), 275-296.

Carl Rohling, The Teplitz incidence. Goethe (left) draws his hat and bows to the imperial party while Beethoven (front-center) strides on

Over the holidays, I’ve had the opportunity to read Red Sorghum, the masterpiece novel by last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan. Set during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the novel tells the stories of people trying to survive with some form of personal dignity under conditions of social collapse and extreme violence. I found it an unflinching novel exploring how the characters cope with living in a cruel and depraved world that is partly of their own making. Red Sorghum easily makes it onto my personal top-100 list of best books ever.

After I’d finished the novel I went onto the web to learn a bit more about the author, Mo Yan. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the English-speaking commentariat seem to whole-heartedly dislike the man and seem to be in unison that the Nobel Prize was undeserved. For instance, Salman Rushie is on record as calling Mo Yan “craven” and “a patsy” and Princeton sinologist Perry Link has a review with the title “Why We Should Criticize Mo Yan.” These negative assessments seem to derive almost exclusively from Mo Yan’s political position as a writer in contemporary China and I’ve found little critical engagement with his actual writing.

Where does this leave me as a reader of Red Sorghum? Was I seduced by the text of an author of questionable morality? Theoretically, of course, the author is dead and the person of the author should not come in to any judgement about their work. Practically, the English-speaking commentariat has ditched theory and claims that Mo Yan’s work is not worth reading because of the author’s moral failings.

It all reminds me of a conversation I had many years ago when I was a graduate student in Germany. I was taking a unit about Goethe and happened to tell an international student from another faculty about it. He told me that he would never read Goethe and held him in total contempt because of his servility. Speechless at this dire verdict on Germany’s national poet, I asked for more information. My interlocutor reminded me of the anecdote when Goethe and Beethoven both holidayed in Bad Teplitz and went for a walk together. They met the empress and her cortege of nobles who were also out walking. Goethe drew his hat, bowed deeply and let the imperial group pass while Beethoven ignored them and kept on walking. When they met up again, Beethoven said to Goethe: “I have waited for you because I respect you and I admire your work, but you have shown too great an esteem to those people.”

Does Goethe’s lack of courage, his obvious servility devalue all his work? At the time, I was nettled: Beethoven had obviously behaved much more courageously and in line with the modern democratic habitus that was second nature to my interlocutor and myself. Even so, dismissing Goethe’s writing out of hand because he behaved differently from what we hoped we ourselves would have done under similar circumstances seemed trivial and small-minded. In fact, it is Goethe’s arrangement with the feudal powers of his time that made his writing possible.

From a distance the view is different than close-up. The law of relativity applies in intercultural communication, too.

The Nobel committee has often been criticized for its Eurocentrism. In fact, Mo Yan is only the second Chinese-language author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Gao Xingjian in 2000). This Nobel Prize is like an invitation to Western audiences to engage with Mo Yan’s work and, more broadly, with Chinese, Asian, non-English-language literature.

I did find out a few non-judgemental things about Mo Yan. Most importantly, the fact that “Mo Yan” (莫言) is actually a pen name and means “Don’t speak!” In a 2011 interview, Mo Yan explained his choice of pen name as follows:

In Chinese, Mo Yan means don’t speak. I was born in 1955. At that time in China, people’s lives were not normal. So my father and mother told me not to speak outside. If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and I did not speak.

I imagine that a writer calling himself “Don’t speak!” must be a bit of a subversive. For Western audiences, another way to translate the pen name might be with reference to the biblical injunction not to judge:

For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? (Matthew 7, 2-3).